Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Thanks to Kate Rothwell, I have a very odd link. Want to upload a photo and have a merman flex his man-titty and his washboard mer-abs while barking greetings to the person in the photo?

Sure you do. Why ever not? BigLots!, which is one of those stores where you walk in for one thing and end up walking out $100 later wondering what the hell happened in there, is allowing you to send tributes visually using their Merman-o-Gram. Yeah, I’m not making that up.

I’m still not sure why a merman, but his abs. His ABS. I cannot stop LOOKING at them. So go ahead, freak out someone you love today. Happy May Day! 

Note! Small contest ahoy at the end of this entry!

Harlequin Enterprises is launching a new line today, Noctune: Bites (no, that is not a description of quality). “Bites” are “dark and sexy paranormal short stories,” available in eBook format. I took one for a test drive over lunch (chicken, pasta, and arugula salad with goat cheese, if you’re curious. I have a love of goat cheese that dare not speak its name) and here’s my lighting-fast hot-off-the-Notepad review.

Sunday (that’d be the girl) is an isolated rural mechanic, and a familiar - a shapeshifting cat. Dean (male) is a land agent, and a werewolf. And, in a bit of situational comedy that made me giggle-snort, Sunday and Dean are trapped in her garage after she tows his broken down truck, because it’s raining cats and dogs outside, and a live wire is down on the ground outside the garage bay doors. Dean needs to have sex that evening - the night of the full moon - to appease the wolf side of his nature lest he “wolf out” and hurt her or someone else. Sunday would love to work on his crankshaft for a few hours, except that as a familiar, her orgasms and post-coital bliss have rather negative consequences due to her paranormal abilities, along the lines of “dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria” plus some otherworldly badasses making unscheduled appearances. You get the picture.

I started my review notes by copying down some of the more absurd dialogue used by the hero in this short story. Dean has a really alarming and unnatural habit of talking to himself in complete, and awkward sentences, such as:

Probably closing her eyes for five minutes after assembling the most amazing collection of items for her annual auction to benefit juvenile diabetes research. Today is day one. Bid early, bid often, and big, big ups to Brenda for a truly impressive display of effort and dedication, and to the folks who donated some seriously asskicking items.

Full disclosure: we donated two, but I wasn’t talking about us. African safari? Big screen tv? Damn, y’all. That is so, so awesome. 

There are a great many resources for folks who are hunting down that obscure category romance from the early back-when to the late days-of-yore, and a great many more resources for people who seek out the latest news and information about the romance world, from writing to reading to - woohoo! - shopping. When I’m looking for news of the genre, I think to myself, “Self, you know where you need to go to find out about new and somewhat innovative small online businesses seeking to serve the avid romance reader? You need to read the U.S. News & World Report.”

From their article on 28 April about the success of small businesses online despite mega-retailers and a very sad and mopey US economy comes this fascinating profile of Derek Stafford, founder and owner of (get ready to bookmark this one because I’d never spell it correctly if you asked me to) Lughnassadh Books:

Trying to compete with Amazon and other behemoths is daunting. But with the right strategy, an entrepreneur with limited resources can cash in on the boom in online retailing. Derek Stafford, who founded and runs the website Lughnassadh Books, sums up his outlook this way: “One of the best ways to compete with Amazon is not to.”

Stafford has been selling used books from his website since 1999. In the early days, he says, he would sell pretty much anything he could find. But now, he says, “I’ve gotten more and more specialized.” He stopped selling all fiction except Harlequin romance novels, for which he discovered a distinct niche market. This focus gives him a brand that distinguishes Lughnassadh from the big boys. He’s trying to create a comprehensive listing of all the Harlequin romance novels to further develop this brand and establish himself as a one-stop source for genre aficionados. “Even if I can’t be the seller, I want to be the source,” Stafford explains.

That’s right: his store has an entire section of nothing but Harlequin romance novels, and there’s a forum attached to the store for customers who can’t remember the name of the book they’re looking for (no one ever has that problem around here. Least of all me).

Thanks to Melissa, who sent me the link to this marvelous bit of Colin-footage:

Melissa asks: “I wonder if he works for the person who makes the succubus rings?”

Sarah asks: “Exactly how wrong is the amount of time I spent wondering whether the photos of Colin’s Colin were online already, and whether I wanted to pollute my search history by looking for them? 80% wrong? 90% wrong? Utterly, completely, and torrentially wrong? How does one quantify that amount of wrong?”